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The New Orleans Streetcar Operators

I want to be a Streetcar Operator in New Orleans, LA when I grow up. The Streetcars Groan, Rattle and Moan along some exquisitely beautiful streets. The movement of the cars along the tracks create a lovely breeze through the open window. But it isn’t easy! The operators work hard to make it go and stop. The rotate a wheel and crank a handle and their arms and hands are all over the controls all the time, so you know its hard, but it probably never gets dull. Plus these people rule their cars! They say “Y’all put your mask on now.” and people say “Yes Ma’am, Yes Sir.” and put their masks on before they get on the streetcar. The operator turns around and says “Move over and let this woman sit down.” and People say “Yes ma’am.” and moved over and let me sit down. I have a lot of regard for these operators. We were only here for five days, but I took to thanking them for the ride every time . Riding the Streetcar was a high point of our trip. If a streetcar operator ever reads this - Thank You!

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Nashville’s Wall Art

This is where Susie is going to talk about making walls beautiful! Stay tuned.

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A Word about Salt Lake City…

And the skinny is…..it’s a mini-Los Angeles!

While we were in Salt Lake City Utah, we read a Wall Street Journal article extolling the virtues of Salt Lake as the next “BEST” place to live.  Wealthy people from California and other states, where housing is too expensive, have begun buying multimillion dollar houses and moving to Salt Lake.  There was lots of talk about how Salt Lake is the best and how the city has been renovating and updating its downtown.  The gushing went on and on and on and on.    

We actually wondered if the author had ever visited Salt Lake City. 

Like LA, the city is mostly endless miles of suburbs, some 20 to 30 miles away from downtown, connected only by ugly concrete 16 lane highways.  On either side of these highways, endless billboards advertise endless shopping centers in an endless, treeless, series of concrete boxes, surrounded by endless, treeless parking lots.  All these wealthy people moved, not to Salt Lake City, but to the small towns north and south of downtown about 20 to 30 miles away. The inter-suburbs streets that connect these suburbs to each other are 8 lanes.  There are no connecting parks, biking, hiking trails.  There are no parks at all actually, except in downtown.  You live in the suburbs and want to take a hike in nature - you drive on an 8 lane highway for 40 minutes to get to a hiking trail. 

There are few bus lines, no intercity trolleys, rail lines, or subways.  A person living here must drive everywhere.  The highways scared us in a way even LA had not.  People are weaving in and out, zooming at top speed, trucks are everywhere, also hauling ass at 80 or 90 miles an hour.  We hated it.

For those who chose to move as far up the mountain as they could go, the suburbs have pushed up against mining operations that have been clearcutting the mountains there for decades, as well as the industrial sites processing oil, gas, and minerals.  So that multi-million dollar house probably doesn’t have a sight line to clear-cut mining, but the new middle class suburbs do.

Lets talk about downtown.  The downtown area sits in a valley, a big bowl, nestled up against the mountains.  Like LA its very picturesque, but the valley causes inversions.  Smog often gets stuck in that valley, unable to move and the air quality is often quite bad because of it.  The smog moves up the mountain and fills in all the crannies, so living in the suburbs does not save a person from bad air.  

They have been attempting to renovate downtown, but it’s patchy.  There will be a five star hotel, a cluster of restaurants on either side and one block away abandoned buildings and two blocks away a park full of homeless people.  So the pattern of 2 blocks nice, 2 blocks sketchy, 2 blocks bad repeats itself all through the downtown area.  We saw million dollar condos in areas I would not get out of my car and walk around.  Yeah gentrification and renovation of the downtown areas can be a great way to get people to move to the downtown area, but a little bit of city planning might go a long way towards making this a success rather than just the willy silliness we observed.  Downtown is not compelling.  

So what does that leave us with?  A city that on all contemporary points of good living; walkable streets, parks, good transportation, good air quality, fails.   Those wealthy people selling their 7 million dollar inflated worth houses in San Jose and LA are just trading for a less expensive version of where they already have been; no inner city, nothing but shopping malls and centers, miles of ugly.